Friday, September 11, 2009

September 11 2009

Here's an interesting take on Nuclear Power from the examiner. This article alleges that emissions from various steps of making uranium fuel ready to generate power make nuclear power a far cry from being clean. This article asserts that some amount of electricity will be used in refining the ore - and some amount of diesel.

Also thrown in are arguments about other kinds of pollution including toxic non CO2 emissions - such as sulphuric acid and carcinogenic particulates.

While this article raises reasonable questions about nuclear power, I don't think any issues have been settled by the arguments within. A quantitative comparison of emissions is necessary - and this I don't see here. How much CO2 is emitted by producing a megawatt hour of electricity using uranium? This information can't be so hard to come by. And here it is. Will have to be read slowly and critically - considering that the gentleman writing this has an axe to grid - he is associated with the fusion energy program at Wisconsin-Madison.

Here's an article on a wholly different subject altogether. Education of women in India. And why doing something as simple and common-sensical as building toilets in schools could stop women from dropping out of schools. I don't think any woman in the west (or any man in the west for that matter) would attend a school without adequate sanitary facilities. It is plain scary to imagine that there's schools in India without bathrooms, actually.

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Here's an interesting one: ending hunger. There's this city in Brazil which had awful socio-economic indicators back in the early '90s. And now, it's doing pretty damn well. You could say it almost ended hunger. Nice to note noted Indian activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva taking an interest in this model. Perhaps with some lobbying, she can coax some city governments in India (a medium sized city like Pune comes to mind) to take such action.